Comparison
Four ways to send your application's email.
Resend, SendGrid, Postmark, your own SMTP box, or us. They aren't the same kind of thing, and the differences that matter are rarely the ones on the pricing page. Here is an honest read, including where we lose.
The short version
If you want one sentence for each:
- Resend has the nicest developer experience in the category. Your data lives in the United States.
- SendGrid will do almost anything at almost any volume, and you'll spend a week learning where the settings are.
- Postmark is the safe choice for transactional mail and has the reputation to match. It's US-hosted.
- Plain SMTP is free until it isn't, and the bill arrives as deliverability problems rather than an invoice.
- Waymail is for teams that need lots of sending domains, want their data in their own region, and want an agent to be able to do the work.
| What you probably care about | Waymail | Resend | SendGrid | Postmark |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Where message content and logs are stored | Your workspace region. EU workspaces stay in Frankfurt. | United States, whichever region you send from. | EU available, on Pro and Premier only, and it needs a dedicated EU IP. | United States. |
| Sending domains on the cheapest paid plan | 25 | 10 | Depends on subusers and package | 5 |
| Domains on the free plan | 10 | 3 | Not published as a free tier of this shape | Free tier is 100 emails a month |
| An MCP server your agent can call | Yes, built in, one per region | No | No | No |
| Marketing email in the same product | Yes, same API and same domains | Yes, separate plan | Yes, but not in the EU environment | Broadcasts, yes |
| Drop-in for an existing Resend integration | Yes, point the official client at us | n/a | No | No |
Competitor details read from each vendor's own published pricing and documentation in September 2026. They change these, so check the links below before you decide anything on our say-so.
Resend
We like Resend. The API is clean, the docs are good, and they set the bar for what a modern email API should feel like. We're compatible with their client on purpose, and that's a compliment rather than a jab.
The thing to know is the difference between sending and storing. You can pick eu-west-1 and your mail goes out of Ireland, which is good for time to inbox. Your account data, the message content, the delivery logs and the webhook payloads, is held in the United States either way. For a lot of companies that's completely fine, and the DPA covers it. If you are selling to European public sector, health, or finance, it tends to be the question that ends the conversation.
Domains are the second one. Three on the free plan, ten on Pro, and a thousand once you are on Scale at $90 a month. If you send on behalf of your customers from their domains, you hit that wall long before you hit the volume the plan is priced for.
The third is the shape of the ladder. Their cheapest paid plan is $20 a month and it comes with 50,000 emails. If you send 50,000 that is excellent value and better than ours. If you send four thousand, you're buying 46,000 you won't use, because there's nothing between free and $20.
And marketing is a separate purchase. Contacts are priced on their own plan, starting at $40 a month for 5,000 and running to $250 for 50,000. So a team doing both is looking at $60 a month before the first campaign goes out. We don't meter contacts at all, which is the biggest single difference in the bill for most people who compare us.
Pick Resend if you send a lot of transactional mail from a handful of domains, you are not doing much marketing, and US storage is not a problem. It is a very good product and above about 26,000 emails a month it is cheaper than we are.
SendGrid
SendGrid is the incumbent, now part of Twilio, and it will handle volumes the rest of us would need a phone call to discuss. It also carries twenty years of surface area, so the answer to "can it do X" is usually yes, and the answer to "where's that setting" is usually a support article.
Their EU data residency is real and worth taking seriously, with one set of caveats you should read before you plan around it. It is on the Pro and Premier packages, it needs a dedicated EU IP rather than a shared one, and Marketing Campaigns are not supported in the EU environment. So if your plan was to keep both transactional and marketing data in Europe on one account, that's the bit to check first.
Pick SendGrid if you are sending at a volume where a dedicated IP and an account manager make sense, and you have someone who already knows the product.
Postmark
Postmark has the best reputation in the category for transactional deliverability, and they earned it by being fussy about what they let through. Their support is genuinely good. If your receipts absolutely have to land, plenty of people will tell you to just use Postmark, and they're not wrong.
Two things make it a different shape from what we do. Data is in the United States. And the plan ladder is built around volume rather than domains, so $15 a month gets you 10,000 emails and five domains, then $18 gets you unlimited domains at the same 10,000 emails. Retention is 45 days, with longer available as a paid add-on.
Pick Postmark if transactional deliverability is the whole job, you are not under a data residency requirement, and you want to stop thinking about it.
Your own SMTP server
Somebody on the team always suggests this, usually with a link to a Postfix tutorial. It's worth taking seriously for about ten minutes.
Sending mail is easy. Getting it delivered isn't. You are taking on IP warming, reverse DNS, SPF and DKIM and DMARC alignment, feedback loops with each major provider, bounce and complaint handling, suppression lists, TLS reporting, and the ongoing job of not appearing on a blocklist because one customer imported a bad list. None of that work is interesting, and all of it is load-bearing. The first time a password reset silently stops reaching Outlook users, you'll spend a fortnight on it.
There's also a quieter cost. When mail goes out of your own box, the delivery record lives in your logs, in whatever shape your logger happens to use, for however long your retention happens to be. Answering "did this customer receive their invoice on the fourth" turns into a grep.
Run your own SMTP if you have a deliverability person, or you are sending internal mail only and nobody will notice if some of it is late.
Where we lose
A comparison page where the author wins every row is an advertisement. Here is the honest accounting.
Transactional volume above about 26,000 a month. That's the crossover, and you can check it. Our $9 plan covers 10,000 then charges $0.70 per extra thousand, so it matches Resend's $20 somewhere around 26,000 emails. Past that they're cheaper, and at 100,000 it's $35 to their name against $55 to ours. If you send a lot of transactional mail and nothing else, use them.
Our free plan is smaller. 1,000 emails a month against Resend's 3,000. We both cap the day at 100, so the difference only shows up over a full month. You get ten domains on ours against their three, which is the trade we chose, but if you want the biggest free tier to kick the tyres, that is not us.
We are young. Postmark has a decade of deliverability reputation and we don't. We run on Amazon SES, which is the same foundation a lot of the industry quietly uses, but reputation is earned by sending and we have been sending for less time than they have.
We do not receive email. No inbound parsing, no inbound routing. If you need a reply address that feeds a support tool, you'll need something else alongside us.
Where we win
Domains. Ten on the free plan, 25 on the $9 plan, unlimited on the $35 one. If you send from your customers' domains, this is usually the number that decides it. Everywhere else it's the number that pushes you up two tiers.
We do not charge for contacts. Marketing is the same plan, the same API and the same domains. On Resend, contacts are a separate subscription that starts at $40 a month for 5,000 and reaches $250 for 50,000. If you send both transactional and marketing mail, that line alone usually decides the comparison, and it is why our $9 plan often replaces a $60 one.
A cheap way in. $9 for 10,000 emails, with 25 domains, is the plan we wished someone sold us. Below about 26,000 emails a month we are the cheapest option in this table, and that's the range most companies are actually in when they start.
Your data stays where your workspace is. An EU workspace keeps message content, delivery events and logs in Frankfurt. Not the sending path, the storage. There's no upgrade to buy and no dedicated IP to arrange.
An agent can drive the whole thing. Every region runs an MCP server, so Claude, Codex, ChatGPT or whatever you build can verify a domain, draft a message, send it, and read back what happened, without you writing an integration for each one. That's the part we think is actually new, and we wrote it up in more detail here.
You can leave. The official Resend client works against our API once you repoint two environment variables, which means trying us is an afternoon rather than a migration project. It also means leaving is easy, and we'd rather compete on that basis.
Pricing, side by side
List prices in US dollars, before tax, as published in September 2026. Check the source before you budget.
| Waymail | Resend | Postmark | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0, 1,000 emails a month, 100 a day, 10 domains | $0, 3,000 emails a month, 100 a day, 3 domains | $0, 100 emails a month |
| Cheapest paid plan | $9, 10,000 emails, 25 domains | $20, 50,000 emails, 10 domains | $15, 10,000 emails, 5 domains |
| Next step up | $35, 60,000 emails, unlimited domains | $35, 100,000 emails | $18, 10,000 emails, unlimited domains |
| Going over the included amount | $0.70 per 1,000, then $0.50 | Move up a plan | Move up a plan |
| Marketing contacts | Not metered. Same plan, same API. | Separate plan: $40 for 5,000, $80 for 10,000, $250 for 50,000 | Broadcasts included in the plan |
| Dedicated IP | Shared, on Amazon SES | $30 a month, Scale plans | Available on higher plans |
| Retention of delivery history | By plan | 30 days on Free | 45 days, longer from $5 a month |
List prices in US dollars before tax, read from each vendor's own pricing page in September 2026. Sources: resend.com/pricing, postmarkapp.com/pricing, sendgrid.com/pricing, ours. SendGrid tiers are not quoted because their pricing page redirected in a loop while we were checking, and a gap beats a number we didn't verify. They change all of this, so check before you budget.
Where the lines cross
Against Resend, who most people are comparing us with, it comes down to volume and whether you send marketing at all. Transactional only, no contacts:
- Under 3,000 a month: their free plan is bigger than ours. Use it.
- Roughly 4,000 to 26,000 a month: we are cheaper, usually by half. There's nothing between free and $20 on their side.
- Above roughly 26,000: they're cheaper, and the gap widens. At 100,000 it is their $35 against our $55.
Add marketing and it moves a long way. Five thousand contacts is $40 a month on top of their transactional plan. It's nothing on top of ours, because we don't count contacts. That's the number to run first if you do both.
Still reading?
Then you've probably got the domain problem, the residency problem, or the agent problem. Those are the three we built for.